Category: English
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Mobility, Crisis, Utopia – An Interview with David Harvey
By Merijn Oudenampsen & Miguel Robles-Duran Space is not a given, but is continuously produced, reconstructed and reconfigured. On the basis of this key insight of the French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, the Marxist geographer David Harvey has focused on the development and incorporation of a spatial analysis in Marxist…
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On the autonomy of the political and the poverty of theory
Presentation at the Amsterdam conference What is Post/Autonomia Today?, 19 may 2011 The immediate occasion to give rise to this presentation, is my attendance to a European gathering of University Struggles, that took place in Paris, in February 2011. With students and researchers coming from all over Europe, in fact…
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Ideology and the media: a story of shifting protagonism
The view that we live in an era of the gradual erosion of ideologies remains dominant today, and is rarely questioned. A look at two major Dutch weeklies, Elsevier and Vrij Nederland, however, shows us that ideology is alive and kicking, and presents us with the central cultural and political…
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City of Glass
Along a twelve hundred meter stretch of Amsterdam’s southern ring road, a business park is being developed, Zuidas (South Axis), the Netherlands’ new prime business location. Billboards of building companies with promising presentations of what the near future has on offer stand amongst the ghostly lit cement skeletons of newly…
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On dog shit and open source urbanism
Amsterdam started branding itself in the eighties, through the now largely forgotten Amsterdam Heeft ‘t campaign. It appealed in popular slang to existing residents of Amsterdam, instructing them to become proud ‘sellers of the town’. The campaign was part and parcel of a paradigm shift: a new entrepreneurial policy took…
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Retracing the Garden City
For almost fifteen years now, the area to the west of Amsterdam’s ring road has been subject to large-scale redevelopment, in what is considered to be Europe’s biggest urban renewal program. The district called the Westelijke Tuinsteden (Western Garden Cities) has been built on the basis of the modernist General…
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Aldo van Eyck and the City as Playground
In 1947, the architect Aldo van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam, on the Bertelmanplein. Many hundreds more followed, in a spatial experiment that has (positively) marked the childhood of an entire generation. Though largely disappeared, defunct and forgotten today, these playgrounds represent one of the most emblematic of…
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‘Decommission, rewrite, and change the course of the future’ – Interview Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
The long version of an interview I did with Franco Berardi, for the art mag Metropolis M, winter 2011. Franco Berardi, better known as “Bifo”, is an Italian autonomist philosopher and media activist. One of the founders of the notorious Radio Alice, a pirate radio station that became the voice…
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Dutch Culture Wars: on the politics of gutting the arts
“No one is safe.” With these words Halbe Zijlstra, the State Secretary of Education, Culture and Science, announced the slashing of the cultural budget on the Dutch national news in December 2010. Whereas cutbacks are generally accompanied by at least the pretension of reluctance or regret, Zijlstra delivered the message…
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